Allan Bloom quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Allan Bloom

Allan Bloom Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Allan Bloom on Wise Famous Quotes.

Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

Every age is blind to its own worst madness.

The self is the modern substitute for the soul.

It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.

Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled.

I have no desire ... to preach a high-minded and merely edifying version of love

The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.

Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?

Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.

[A]ny notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became entertainment.

Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.

Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power.

I am not a conservative - neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook ... I just do not happen to be that animal.

An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.

Most of all I admire Mozart's capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.

There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.

Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.

The students [of the 60s] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents conspicuous consumption.

One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation.

To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.

I suggest that we need a generation or two not of theory but of an attempt to discover the real phenomena of eros.

The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.

This nation's impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.

We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.

The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

The importance of these [college] years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.

There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.

The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.